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Joanne Faulkner is the author of The Importance of Being Innocent, and an academic whose work examines the significance of innocence and childhood for contemporary understandings of political community.
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation, Faulkner argues that the assumptions underpinning our obsessions with childhood purity are deeply fallacious – and address the needs of adults rather than the wellbeing of the young.
Tip: In your comment, you can link to a particular point in the video like this: 0m30s for the 30th second, or 4m18s for 4 minutes and 18 seconds in.
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As a layman, I couldn't follow the 5-point summary of the book or the general introduction. I would probably understand it if I watched it again, but speeches are all about communication. At the risk of sounding stupid, I think that the introduction could've been simplified a bit. People appreciate things that they can understand simply, things that they don't have to devote their whole attention to.
So the message was ultimately this: we should stop thinking of children as innocent people in a perpetual state of crisis. These feelings are, in part, for our own sake. We thrive off emotion, and when we think of children in some kind of danger (i.e. childhood obesity) we get to feel protective.
When we think of children as innocent, lower class children/ children in poverty lose out. They won't act innocent because they aren't innocent, so we alienate them. They aren't acting as we want them to.
I guess if I had to see the bigger picture here, what is being said is this: keep an open mind. We think of children as purely innocent because we can think of them as something we have to protect. It's easy to think of children as purely innocent. But remembering myself as a child, I wasn't purely innocent. Children are like adults, except unrefined by society. Maybe we should treat them more as equals. Maybe we should stop thinking that they're always in some kind of crisis.
Hopefully I didn't take the wrong message home from the video. But yeah, that was some nice food for thought overall.
Ashutosh
09 June at 04:11AM